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Hi there, hope you're having a great Friday!
This is Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus, with a handpicked weekly roundup of eCommerce articles.
This week we tested Cloudways’ $10 per month plan on a WooCommerce store, using our own Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme to gauge performance.
It's the cheapest plan offered by Cloudways and includes:
- 1 GB RAM
- 1 core processor
- 25 GB storage space
- 1 TB bandwidth
We tested the homepage, shop page and single product page with Google page speed insights. It's just the core theme installation, we didn't set up Autoptimize or perform any other speed tweaks.
Take a look at what we found in our post
This week I was interested in Google’s John Mueller response to a question about the word count in articles.
He was asked if it’s helpful to add more words to a web page to help it rank better within Google's results.
The idea was that if a page wasn’t ranking, adding more relevant content will help.
His reply:
“From our point of view the number of words on a page is not a quality factor, not a ranking factor. So just blindly adding more and more text to a page doesn’t make it better.”
You can see the full Q&A session with Mueller in the video at the end of the article.
See why Word Count is not a Quality Factor
Colm has been taking a look at a new plugin called FluentCRM and it looks really impressive.
You can use it to help manage your customer relationships, build your email lists, send email campaigns, build funnels, and increase your conversion rates.
There's a free version of FluentCRM in the .org plugins directory which seems well worth trying if you are running a WooCommerce store and want to get to understand your customers better.
We'll be doing a full review of this and the Pro version on our CommerceGurus blog in the coming weeks so watch out for that.
Check out the FluentCRM plugin
Jason Fried, founder of Basecamp, and the hey.com email platform sent out an interesting tweet last week.
Email is the internet's oldest instant self-publishing platform. Except you have to define a small audience every time you write. But what if you didn't? What if you could just email the web to reach the world?
The result is this.
That is what it looks like on the author’s side once you email [email protected] to post a message. You get the URL to share, a button to edit at the bottom, and the option to send the post to your mailing list as well.
It's only available for users of Hey.com but I thought it was a fascinating and simple method to share long form thoughts.
See the tweet that started it and the debate in the replies
Chrome Canary, the browser’s nightly build for developers, has been testing a new Follow button. The button appears on the homepage of a site, as well as in the browser menu.
Before the explosion of social media sites, RSS buttons were prominently featured on WordPress blogs. Having the ability to follow a site for new updates, without having to check back manually was a brilliant way to stay up to date.
Is Google quietly building a replacement for Google Reader? A mashup of Twitter, RSS feeds and other content discovery options? It will be interesting to see how this pans out.
Learn about the new follow button on WPTavern
Latest Shoptimizer updates
If you've been using our Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme, we pushed a couple of nice updates this week in version 2.3.6, squashing a couple of bugs and adding some nice features. See everything on the theme's changelog page.
We also did a big update to our Shoptimizer documentation area. There are loads of new articles including a code snippets section so be sure and check that out!
That's it for this edition. Simply reply to this email if you have any questions or suggestions, we read every message. Have a great week and best of luck with your projects!
Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus
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